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how do you host your RoR app?

I'm curious as to the best way to host a RoR app. I've read shared hosting isn't all that great, what are the other options and what have you chosen? Semi Dedicated, Dedicated, VPS, etc? I'm expecting something in the neighborhood of less than 250 unique visitors a day. If you have a live example, post the URL too please. I'm always interesting in seeing what other people are doing with RoR. Thanks.

I use a textdrive.com shared hosting for testing RoR and it works fine

On the other hand, I've used textdrive and they weren't very good. My server was going down almost weekly it seemed.

You may want to consider Railsmachine - a bit pricier than shared hosting but you get what you pay for - I've read lots of good reports and it has some cool rake tasks for getting things up and running.

anyone use Westhost.com VPS?

I've looked at hosting from a myriad of solutions. I know you get what you pay for, but we also are bootstrapping this web application. So, we want something to scale as needed with our hopeful growth.

I actually just bought a cheap package from http://www.collarhosting.com which offers ruby on rails hosting, so its just as simple as uploading the files on the server, but the files go in the cgi bin I think instead of public_html

If you've got problems with FastCGI, yes. Mongrel is quite a bit easier to get working (Just install a gem and start the server Webrick style.), but FastCGI is slightly faster (There are benchmarks on the TextDrive blog, not by much though.).

On the other hand, I've used textdrive and they weren't very good. My server was going down almost weekly it seemed.

You may want to consider Railsmachine - a bit pricier than shared hosting but you get what you pay for - I've read lots of good reports and it has some cool rake tasks for getting things up and running.

Well I've never had a problem with TD since 4 months when I first started using them. I found them simply on the RoR .org site where they were described as the official Ruby on Rails host !! so I didn't look further especially that their price was quite good

I must say I am not hosting any functional sites there so I am not checking the uptime etc...

Consider Apache 2.2, which has much better mod_proxy/mod_proxy_balancer support with Mongrel.

Actually, mod_proxy for lighttpd is going to be much improved soon, in the next release (see http://blog.lighttpd.net/articles/20...mod_proxy_core). That said, I run both Apache 2.2 + mod_proxy_balancer and lighttpd + mod_proxy + pound on separate sites, and both with Mongrel backends, and both approaches are workable.

The main beef people have with in lighttpd is mod_proxy, but you can easily do away with that by putting a 3rd-party load-balancer like pound or pen in front of your mongrel cluster. At least, until mod_proxy is "fixed"

That said, I still recommend going to Apache route especially if you are more familiar with managing and configuring Apache (as most webmasters would be).

Old thread, but as its been brought alive recently I thought I'd add what we do. We run our own 4 server Rails Cluster with lighttpd, mongrels and mysql - works very nicely - but then again, most things you setup and manage yourself run as you would expect.